#Rami Malek Impersonates Pete Davidson In A Wholly Satisfying Saturday Night Live (With A Little Help From Daniel Craig)

Mattress Store – It can be hard to find a mattress that provides top notch comfort, so you want to make sure that it fits all your sleeping needs. The employees of Sleepy Town USA are here to help, even if it means watching customers carry out a series of oddball vignettes between a husband and wife. Rami Malek’s trademark intensity made his interaction with a melodramatic Aidy Bryant that much more satisfying. Similar to hosts like Adam Driver, Malek commits to the bit like a dedicated dramatic performer rather than simply trying to ham it up for laughs, and here it works spectacularly. 

Bug Assembly – Bowen Yang often plays variations on the same flamboyantly gay character. But it’s the subtle changes in those variations that make him much more than a one-trick pony. Here, that flamboyancy is executed as a child portraying a Daddy Long Legs spider for a school’s bug assembly, emphasis on the “Daddy” part of the nomenclature. Watching Yang strut his stuff in that spider costume made for a great physical gag, but it’s the inappropriate answers to questions about the actual bug that made this sketch shine. As a little nitpick, it seems odd that all these young kids have rather professionally tailored bug costumes when more low-rent costumes might have made the proceedings a little funnier.

Since this was the first sketch after the monologue, I was worried that this episode wouldn’t let Malek have any fun, relegating him to the straight man throughout the night’s sketches. But thankfully, Malek was allowed to spread his wings in surprising ways, and the show ended up playing to his strengths rather well.

Celeb School Game Show – The game show formula and celebrity impersonation round-up is a staple of “SNL,” but it actually feels like it’s been awhile since they’ve done such a lengthy version of a sketch like this. First of all, it was nice to see this executed outside of a “Celebrity Family Feud” bubble. Second, the line-up of impressions here are almost all fantastic. Admittedly, I wish James Austin Johnson’s take on Adam Driver was a bit more meaty, and Chris Redd’s impression of Lil’ Wayne is a surface-level performance, but everyone else does a bang-up job. However, the standout is Rami Malek, who absolutely nailed his impersonation of Pete Davidson. Meanwhile, Pete Davidson played Rami Malek a little less successfully. But the draw here was seeing these two play off each other, and it worked very well. Special shoutout to Melissa Villaseñor’s take on Kristen Wiig, and Kenan Thompson can still work wonders with the thankless game show host role.